The Balfour Declaration

[Sixties Fan]

On November 2, 1917, my predecessor Lord Balfour sat in the Foreign Secretary's office and composed a letter that laid the foundations of the State of Israel.

On the Centenary, I will say what I believe: the Balfour Declaration was indispensable to the creation of a great nation. In the seven decades since its birth, Israel has prevailed over what has sometimes been the bitter hostility of neighbors to become a liberal democracy and a dynamic hi-tech economy.

In a region where many have endured authoritarianism and misrule, Israel has always stood out as a free society. Like every country, Israel has faults and failings. But it strives to live by the values in which I believe.

I served a stint at a kibbutz in my youth, and I saw enough to understand the miracle of Israel: the bonds of hard work, self-reliance, and an audacious and relentless energy that hold together a remarkable country.

Most of all, there is the incontestable moral goal: to provide a persecuted people with a safe and secure homeland. So I am proud of Britain's part in creating Israel and Her Majesty's Government will mark the Centenary of the Balfour Declaration on Thursday in that spirit.

I am also heartened that the new generation of Arab leaders does not see Israel in the same light as their predecessors. I trust that more will be done against the twin scourges of terrorism and anti-Semitic incitement.

In the final analysis, it is Israelis and Palestinians who must negotiate the details and write their own chapter in history. A century on, Britain will give whatever support we can in order to close the ring and complete the unfinished business of the Balfour Declaration.

My vision for Middle East peace between Israel and a new Palestinian state

 

[Sixties Fan]

Peace processors used to believe that Israeli-Palestinian peace was a 1967 issue, negotiating suitable borders; or perhaps a 1948 issue, dealing with the refugees from the Arab war against Israel. It is now clear that it is a 1917 issue – the rejection by the Palestinian Arabs of any Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the ancestral homeland of the Jews. It is, in the words of Ron Dermer, currently Israel’s ambassador to America, the “core issue”: the Palestinians will not even agree that the goal of the “peace process” is “two states for two peoples.”

Instead of referring to “two states for two peoples,” the Palestinians always frame the goal of the process as ending “the occupation that began in 1967.” The reason they invariably add the last four words to that formulation is that they believe there is also another occupation that they want eventually to end as well: “the occupation that began in 1948.” That is the reason they say they can “never” give up an asserted “right of return.” To do so would be to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

(full article online)

How the Balfour Declaration Has Emerged at the Crux Of the War Against Israel - The New York Sun

 

[Sixties Fan]

Balfour, the Palestinians — and No Peace

 

[Sixties Fan]

My Right Word: That Labour Party's Unofficial Balfour Declaration

 

[Sixties Fan]

Daphne Anson: David Singer: Balfour Declaration Falsehoods Fuel Jew-Hatred and Israel-Bashing

 

[fanger]

Her support for the existence of Israel is, by her own lights, conditional on the existence of a state of Palestine. She thus displays her profound ignorance of Jewish, Arab and Middle Eastern history by assuming that people called the Palestinians were entitled to the same promise of a national homeland.

There was never, of course, any “Palestinian” people.The reason the Balfour Declaration promised the former land of Israel to the Jews was that they are the onlypeople for whom that land was ever their national kingdom, the only extant indigenous people of that land and who were merely to be restored to their own homeland from which they had been exiled by succeeding waves of occupiers.

By wrapping herself in the Palestinian cause, Thornberry is associating her party once again with an agenda of colonialist aggression (the Palestinians remain committed to the destruction of Israel), racist ethnic cleansing (the Palestinians repeatedly declare that no Jews would be allowed to live in a state of Palestine) and antisemitism (the Palestinians attempt ceaselessly to write the Jews out of their own history and religion and use Nazi-style imagery and blood libels to incite their children to anti-Jewish hatred).

And of course, a Palestine state alongside Israel has been on offer repeatedly since 1936 – yet it has been the Arabs and “Palestinians” who have refused it while the Jews have always accepted it. There could be a state of Palestine tomorrow if the Palestinians would accept Israel’s right to exist alongside it. Instead, they want such a state solely in order to destroy Israel altogether.

(full article online)

The malevolent guest at London's Balfour dinner | MelaniePhillips.com

Israel MK: Palestinians’ ‘liability’ is that ‘they weren’t born Jews’
“When we say to the Palestinians, ‘We are giving you a state, let’s make peace’ – it’s deceiving them,” Zohar told the paper.

“No one is going to give them a state, not the left either. I am saying: Let’s cut this problem off before it begins and stop with the lies. We’ll tell them: ‘Guys, no state, live here with us, prosper, earn a living, educate your children’.”

Asked whether he meant that Palestinians in an annexed West Bank would not vote in the Knesset elections, Zohar replied in the affirmative.

“We must always maintain control over the mechanisms of the state, as the Jewish people that received this country by right and not by an act of charity.”
Israel MK: Palestinians’ ‘liability’ is that ‘they weren’t born Jews’
The lawmaker who thinks Israel is deceiving the Palestinians: 'No one is going to give them a state'

 

[danielpalos]

Only Judeans who have no State of Judea, have a problem, not Israelis or Israelites.

Reminds me of the "Palestinians".

 

[Sixties Fan]

The Balfour Declaration was not addressed to a foreign group, giving them permission to enter the land. On the contrary, it was recognition of what Jews -- who have an indigenous connection to the land -- had already accomplished and would continue to develop.
--------

The 1925 Larousse French dictionary had an entry for "Palestine":
This translates as:
PALESTINE, the land of Syria, between Phenicia in the North, the Dead Sea in the South, the Mediterranean in the West, and the Syrian Desert in the East, watered by the Jordan. It is a narrow strip of land, narrowed between the sea, Lebanon, and traversed by the Jordan, which throws itself into the Dead Sea. It is also called, in Scripture, Land of Chanaan, Promised Land and Judea . It is today [in 1925] a Jewish state under the mandate of England; 770,000 inhabitants. Jerusalem capital.Already in 1925, before WWII and before the Israeli War of Independence, there was a recognition of a Jewish state called Palestine, a state of 770,000 inhabitants that included both Jews and Muslims. It's capital was Jerusalem, which did not have that designation under Ottoman rule.
-------
The culmination of that self-determination -- with a state for the Arabs -- was prevented by war and a refusal to accept even the presence of Jews on the land.

So, what were the Jews doing in Palestine before the Lord Balfour came out with his famous declaration? They were not waiting around to enter as invited guests. Instead, they worked on a land to which they have a 3,000 year history. Jews with indigenous roots to the land worked to re-establish it as a sovereign state, something it had never been since the time of the Romans.

Jews made a choice.
The Arabs made their own choice too.

(full article online)

Balfour didn't create the Jewish national home - it was already there and everyone knew it (Daled Amos) ~ Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

Her support for the existence of Israel is, by her own lights, conditional on the existence of a state of Palestine. She thus displays her profound ignorance of Jewish, Arab and Middle Eastern history by assuming that people called the Palestinians were entitled to the same promise of a national homeland.

There was never, of course, any “Palestinian” people.The reason the Balfour Declaration promised the former land of Israel to the Jews was that they are the onlypeople for whom that land was ever their national kingdom, the only extant indigenous people of that land and who were merely to be restored to their own homeland from which they had been exiled by succeeding waves of occupiers.

By wrapping herself in the Palestinian cause, Thornberry is associating her party once again with an agenda of colonialist aggression (the Palestinians remain committed to the destruction of Israel), racist ethnic cleansing (the Palestinians repeatedly declare that no Jews would be allowed to live in a state of Palestine) and antisemitism (the Palestinians attempt ceaselessly to write the Jews out of their own history and religion and use Nazi-style imagery and blood libels to incite their children to anti-Jewish hatred).

And of course, a Palestine state alongside Israel has been on offer repeatedly since 1936 – yet it has been the Arabs and “Palestinians” who have refused it while the Jews have always accepted it. There could be a state of Palestine tomorrow if the Palestinians would accept Israel’s right to exist alongside it. Instead, they want such a state solely in order to destroy Israel altogether.

(full article online)

The malevolent guest at London's Balfour dinner | MelaniePhillips.com

Flush the Royal

There already is, and always has been, a state for the Paleonasties: Jordan. If the King there doesn't like it, how is it his country anyway?

 

[Sixties Fan]

Year Zero: The Palestinians and the Balfour Declaration

 

[Sixties Fan]

http://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/the-criminal-balfour-declaration/

 

[Sixties Fan]

Why they protest Balfour

 

[Sixties Fan]

Boris has misread the Balfour Declaration

 

[danielpalos]

The Balfour Declaration was not addressed to a foreign group, giving them permission to enter the land. On the contrary, it was recognition of what Jews -- who have an indigenous connection to the land -- had already accomplished and would continue to develop.
--------

The 1925 Larousse French dictionary had an entry for "Palestine":
This translates as:
PALESTINE, the land of Syria, between Phenicia in the North, the Dead Sea in the South, the Mediterranean in the West, and the Syrian Desert in the East, watered by the Jordan. It is a narrow strip of land, narrowed between the sea, Lebanon, and traversed by the Jordan, which throws itself into the Dead Sea. It is also called, in Scripture, Land of Chanaan, Promised Land and Judea . It is today [in 1925] a Jewish state under the mandate of England; 770,000 inhabitants. Jerusalem capital.Already in 1925, before WWII and before the Israeli War of Independence, there was a recognition of a Jewish state called Palestine, a state of 770,000 inhabitants that included both Jews and Muslims. It's capital was Jerusalem, which did not have that designation under Ottoman rule.
-------
The culmination of that self-determination -- with a state for the Arabs -- was prevented by war and a refusal to accept even the presence of Jews on the land.

So, what were the Jews doing in Palestine before the Lord Balfour came out with his famous declaration? They were not waiting around to enter as invited guests. Instead, they worked on a land to which they have a 3,000 year history. Jews with indigenous roots to the land worked to re-establish it as a sovereign state, something it had never been since the time of the Romans.

Jews made a choice.
The Arabs made their own choice too.

(full article online)

Balfour didn't create the Jewish national home - it was already there and everyone knew it (Daled Amos) ~ Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Of course not; it created an Israeli national home.

 

[Shusha]

Of course not; it created an Israeli national home.

It reconstituted the Jewish national home.

 

[P F Tinmore]

Of course not; it created an Israeli national home.

It reconstituted the Jewish national home.

That's funny, for the hundreds of years that the territory was ruled by the Ottoman Empire I don't recall even one time that a Jew knocked on anyone's door with deed in hand claiming that land.

 

[Shusha]

Of course not; it created an Israeli national home.

It reconstituted the Jewish national home.

That's funny, for the hundreds of years that the territory was ruled by the Ottoman Empire I don't recall even one time that a Jew knocked on anyone's door with deed in hand claiming that land.

Interestingly, neither do I recall the Arab "Palestinians" insisting upon national sovereignty from the Ottomans.

 

[abi]

Interestingly, neither do I recall the Arab "Palestinians" insisting upon national sovereignty from the Ottomans.

But, what of what PFT just pointed out? It seems like you are deflecting.

It reconstituted the Jewish national home.

It has been clearly shown for you that the zionist regime cannot rightfully speak for the Jewish people. If you could drop this line, you would be much closer to understanding a solution that you keep speaking of.

And are you aware that the Balfour document is not a legal one?

 

[Shusha]

And are you aware that the Balfour document is not a legal one?

Oh, this aught to be good. Do tell.

 

[Shusha]

It has been clearly shown for you that the zionist regime cannot rightfully speak for the Jewish people. If you could drop this line, you would be much closer to understanding a solution that you keep speaking of.

Again, you claim that the Jewish people can not rightfully speak for the Jewish people. That is just silliness.

A solution can not be found in changing the thinking of the Jewish people. The Jewish people have accepted and offered solutions time and time and time again. The source of the conflict is the Arab insistence that no Jewish state exist. The conflict will continue until that ideology changes.